The indie Hindi movie that got a standing ovation at Berlinale

Amit Masurkar is winning critics over with his new black comedy Newton

The last time we spoke to director Amit Masurkar, he was recovering from the sheer physical toll of of his DIY debut film, indie sleeper hit of 2014 Sulemani Keeda. “Never again”, he said to the idea another gruelling movie made for nothing. And so he went ahead and hired the biggest stars in Bollywood for the normcorest romcom, replete with Badshah item number and a gyrating Sunny Leone. Just kidding.

For his new black comedy Newton, Masurkar relocated to the jungles of conflict-ridden Chhattisgarh, with the action taking place on voting day in a Maoist-controlled town. The result is the dark, wry film that’s generated a whole lot of buzz as well as several standing ovations earlier this week at Berlinale. Over a short WhatsApp call, Masurkar breaks down the feeling.

Congratulations on Newton’s premiere at Berlinale. Did you expect a standing ovation?

That’s just the polite thing to do around here. People attend a screening and if the cast and director are present, they give standing ovations – it’s pretty common. But we’ve had housefuls at every one of the three screenings, which was surprising to me. The third was the biggest, held in this Forties-era grand cinema house. It was beautiful.

Newton’s a dark comedy rooted in a very specific local context, but they’re getting the humour, which to me is great.

What’s the nicest thing you’ve heard so far?

In one of the hour-long Q&A sessions, this guy wanted to know if I thought they were a good audience. And I was a little taken aback but I said, absolutely. We all have these prejudices when it comes to other countries, and we’re always surprised by each other’s cinema. Human emotions might appear different, but they’re the same in any language, and that’s the power of cinema.

Newton tells the story of a day of elections in conflict-riddled Chhattisgarh. What led you to the subject?

I was brainstorming after Sulemaani Keeda and one day, I thought of reading the Constitution of India. The Preamble, in particular, is such a great document. It’s so idealistic, so profound, and yet, in practice, things are so different. So I thought about writing a film on democracy. No one had done this before in India – a film on the electoral process in 120 minutes. And I thought of setting it up in a polling booth in an area where elections are problematic, and executed just to keep up the pretence of control.

The lead character’s – Nutan/Newton – main aim is to ensure free and fair elections are conducted in his territory. Is he a nationalist?

No, he just wants to do a good job, just has a very strong sense of duty.

Why did you cast Rajkummar Rao as Newton?

I’d met Raj a long ago on the sets of LSD. He’s sincere, and I knew only he could pull it off. He’s also quite funny, if you know him, and that aspect fed into Newton’s character as well.

Did you read a lot to ensure authenticity?

I did everything I could in the short time I had to prepare – read books, watched documentaries, set up meetings with human rights activists and the election commission. Then Mayank Tewari (actor in Sulemaani Keeda) came on board as scriptwriter, and he’s a journalist from Delhi, he knew a lot about the issue. We travelled intensively in Chhattisgarh, to areas under government control, under Maoist control. We spoke to cops, locals, insurgents. Our casting director actually moved to Chhattisgarh for a couple of months.

You also shot the whole film on location in the jungles of Chhattisgarh. Was it as guerrilla as your last film, parts of which you shot in friends’ apartments to save costs?

It’s been completely different. For Keeda, our entire crew was seven people. On this film, we had seven assistant directors alone. We practically took over the towns of Dalli and Rajhera for the shoot. There were three hotels, fully booked out for us. In addition to the main cast [also ft. Pankaj Tripathi, Anjali Patil and Raghubir Yadav], the film has at least 100 actors, all of them local. Plus, there was no network, so there was nothing to do but focus on making the film.

Any trouble while you were there?

That’s the irony. Chhattisgarh is a real conflict zone – and absolutely nothing happened. The government wanted us to shoot there because they wanted to show that it was safe. The Maoists wanted us to shoot there so we could depict the real situation. I guess, we were spared since we weren’t activists or human rights lawyers; just another Bollywood crew.